What's your favorite on-line fitness tracking tool?

April 1, 2009 8:34 AM

Fitness 2.0 quesiton: I'm a big fan of Fuelly. It's one of the few Web 2.0 tools that I've stuck with. I want to be as disciplined with tracking my workouts as I am my gas usage. For me, a user-friendly tool makes a big difference. Can anyone recommend a high-quality Web 2.0 fitness tracking tool (preferably a free one)?

I've looked at Traineo and a couple of others, but wanted to see if the hive mind could come up with a strong recommendation. If you can let me know why you've stuck with it (or why you've dropped it, if it's a negative review), I'd appreciate it. Thanks.

posted by scblackman to health & fitness (7 answers total)

I can't seem to keep with any fitness site since they seem tailored to lifting weights vs. majority-running stuff, but it seems like Gyminee has the most momentum/stuff going for it.
posted by tmcw at 8:42 AM on April 1, 2009

weendure.com has swimming, biking, and running, plus "bike trainer". You could put weights/yoga under "bike trainer" and put notes on the session.

It's pretty full-featured, but not maintained much. We had a MeFi challenge there last summer on who could bike the most consecutive days. (I lost, a week before the end of the challenge, because my best man wouldn't let me ride the morning of my wedding. Probably a good idea, considering my proneness to accidents...)
posted by notsnot at 8:50 AM on April 1, 2009

Here are a few others:
- Gimme20
- Gyminee
- SparkPeople

Gimme20 might be the most web2.0. But SparkPeople has been around for a while, building up a large collection of recipes, tips, and members. Maybe play around with these to see which interface feels best for you!
posted by barnone at 9:05 AM on April 1, 2009

Sorry - Gyminee might be the most web 2.0 (not Gimme).
posted by barnone at 9:05 AM on April 1, 2009

Gyminee is probably what you want. You can track body metrics as well as exercise stats.

The interface is good but not not great-- there's a lot going on which you may not need (I don't use the social features or the nutrition stuff), so you may have to play with it a bit to figure out exactly what you'll use and how.

The iPhone interface is great, if that applies to you.
posted by DrJohnEvans at 9:36 AM on April 1, 2009

I'm using gyminee (there's even a metafilter group where I'm currently the king of nutrition and exercise goals, although the group isn't very active in terms of discussion -- last post June of last year). Like DrJohnEvans says, the iPhone interface is nice and they are developing a native iPhone app for tracking food+exercise.

As far as tracking exercise specifically, I think it does a good job. You can create workouts or use other users' workout. If an exercise isn't in their database, you can make a custom exercises. There are some nice charts and graphs you can view to see your progress.

The nutrition tracking has a lot (but not as much as Calorie King) of foods in the database. There are USDA items with full details and plenty of user-submitted items. My only gripe is some of the user submitted items aren't as complete as I'd like.

You get a letter grade on the number of days you workout and meet your calorie goals. I get reinforcement everyday to keep an A grade in both categories.

I don't use the gym buddies feature, but I do like reading the advice in the forums. I also recently started doing some of the challenges.

It isn't perfect, but it is working for me right now. The developers do seem pretty responsive to fixing problems and adding features.
posted by birdherder at 10:12 AM on April 1, 2009

Gyminee is mad, but Joe's Goals is a neat little app, too. I give you that it is not very Web 2.0.
posted by yoHighness at 8:15 PM on April 1, 2009